The real harm to pubs here in the UK comes not from the smoking ban but rather from the massive levels of duty levelled on alcohol. This is of course (shriek all you like you Reaganite/Clintonite ignorami, but I’m afraid my capacity for charity has rather expired in the light of the cold hard facts) due entirely to the general trend of the last three and a half decades: transfer tax from the filthy rich to the ordinary public. Thus in the UK we now pay 17.5 (temporarily reduced to 15) % VAT on everything except children’s clothes, and 50-60% duty on alcohol and cigarettes paid for by the poor (not to mention the lottery tickets they’re lured into buying too!) This is how in the UK the rich, not to mention the non-doms (including especially various ex-Soviet oligarchs living fat on the expropriated wealth (three cheers for the free market!) of the former USSR while ex-Soviet pensioners freeze to death in the street), get away without paying pretty much anything without the economy collapsing. But now it is collapsing, and our patience with this filth is running out. We need a world government to get these people against the wall and financially beat them senseless. Trillions and trillions of dollars are being tauntingly waved in the faces of the poor and then invested in frivolities. (I know: half they’re yachts are made down the road from my house). We have to take it back. Once we have these bastards in the corner then they are at our mercy: they can hardly offshore it to Mars.